Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Recently I watched Hud for the first time in about thirty years. It's a movie that made an impression on me as a boy when the BBC used to show it, which seemed to be fairly often. Although easy to lump in with that other Paul Newman movie Cool Hand Luke - both set in the present day South, hard bitten and mean - Hud never seems to get played on US television, and nor does it seem to be particularly fondly thought of, or even remembered. Probably that's because where Cool Hand Luke allows its lead character to go out in a blaze of glory, his spirit unbroken, Hud's ending is bleak and unsentimental, a 1970s ending in a 1963 movie.Viewing Hud for the first time as a grown-up, I found it ever so slightly overstated in terms of its moral design - the contrast between the staunchly principled Texas rancher Homer Bannon and his slickly charming but cynical and unscrupulous son Hud - but still haunting and impressively somber. The element I picked up that escaped me as a youngster is that it's a sort of meta-movie: at once an elegy for an earlier mode of Western (embodied in the patriarch Homer) and a preview of the new post-heroic Western featuring lashings of brutal violence, characters with no redeeming qualities, unhappy endings, etc. Pauline Kael called Hud an "anti-Western" - even "anti-American".

Watching the movie made me wonder whether Joe Carducci had anything to to say about Hud in his new book Stone Male: Requiem for the Living Picture;Would Homer Bannon - weathered and leathery after a life on the open range, a man of few words but ironclad morality - correspond to the hero archetype celebrated in its pages?

Stone Male is long-awaited. I remember Joe talking about this book as an imminent thing when I interviewed him in 1996 about his classic Rock and the Pop Narcotic: Testament for the Electric Church. Other books came out in the interim - Life Against Dementia, a collection of writings; Enter Naomi, Joe's memorial to SST's resident photographer Naomi Petersen - but Carducci never stopped working on what may well be the grand opus of his life, even more so than Rock and the Pop. For Carducci originally arrived in Los Angeles as a cine-fiend looking to break into movie writing. Getting involved in record distribution was a detour from his chosen path, as was his subsequent recruitment by SST as a manager to put the label on a more solid organisational footing. His experiences at SST and the feeling that the critical establishment in America had failed to engage with the most crucial rock music of the era led him to formulate the stunningly original rock aesthetic contained within R&tPN. But although the book was rereleased a couple of times with updates and expansions, it turned out to be both his grand statement on rock and his last statement: grunge might have been the triumphant vindication of Carducci's theories, but in its wake his interest in rock waned. So he was drawn back to his original and perhaps Number One passion: the movies. Rock and the Pop Narcotic's polemic against college-educated liberal taste is, however, paralleled in Stone Male - a celebration of theWestern (along with other action genre films). Carducci's intent is to rescue from condescension and incomprehension that lineage of granite-jawed leading men who under-emote (John Wayne, Ben Johnson, Gary Cooper, Charles Bronson, Lee Van Cleef, Clint Eastwood - and countless lesser known figures he's salvaging from obscurity). At the same time he is implicitly - sometimes explicitly - demoting that breed of scenery-chewing blowhard (Brando, Dean, Hoffman, et al ) that gets perennially rewarded and awarded by the Motion Picture Academy and by middlebrow critics. Carducci's particular interest is actors who are non-theatrical because they never had any formal training. In the early Westerns, they often started their careers as stunt men or handling horses. Many had fought in one world war or another. For Carducci this infuses their physical presence - the way they carry themselves in front of the camera - with an aura of having been tested, an ingrained knowledge of physical adversity and danger. But more important than such real-world experience is the fact that these actors aren't trained thespians. "The heroic image affects you more if the actor's non-professional," Carducci told me in '96. "That interests me because I don't like over-acting."But how about Hud? There's no mention of it in Stone Male's index, which somehow didn't surprise me. Melvyn Douglas, the actor who played Homer Bannon, gets a passing mention, seemingly as an actor who career goes down the wrong path as far as Joe's concerned. Paul Newman appears twice. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid figures for Carducci as a softcore dilution of the strong, silent tradition that he's eulogising and elegising. But Hombre gets the thumbs-up, with Newman's role bracketed alongside Charles Bronson in Chato's Land, Kurt Russell in Soldier, and Cornel Wilde in The Naked Prey as exemplary under-acting. These "four starring roles," writes Carducci, "... are terse in the extreme - the hero has less dialogue than many an extra... Each of these [roles] goes beyond laconic in the tradition of Eastwood, Wayne, or Cooper to become a thing that tests not just the actors' intrinsic presence, but the writers's abilities to lay out plot and character in the physical action, and the directors's abilities to write this action across landscape with a camera. These films are modern star vehicles but they are also rare tests of talkies against the grammar of the silent film for long stretches."

Friday, June 24, 2016

For years now independent researcher Ian Helliwell has been excavating the early decades of electronic and tape-based experimental music, with a particular focus on the British story. He's displayed his discoveries via a radio series, The Tone Generation, the F.C. Judd documentary Practical Electronica, and most recently through an irregular series of in-depth features in The Wire. Now he's written a book, Tape Leaders: A Compendium Of Early British Electronic Music Composers.

As seen with his Wire article on Practical Electronics magazine as a hub for DIY synth operators, Helliwell's special fascination is for a breed of British amateurs who doggedly pursued their eccentric interests. Unlike Europe, where composers generally came out of the academy or were attached to the experimental units of national radio stations, or America, where they might also be supported by corporations like Bell, the U.K. was a particularly fertile ground for hobbyists - boffins like Peter Keen and Brian Whibley who cobbled together contraptions in shed or garage workshops. Other archetypes discernible in the pages of Tape Leaders are the formally trained composer who - in the absence of institutional encouragement or funding - is forced to go it alone (Janet Beat, Cyril Clouts)
and the artistic polymath drawn to electronics as an accompaniment to their visual or performance work (Ken Gray, who prefers to think of himself as a "communications engineer", or the choreographer and dancer Ernest Berk, who was also a naturist and all-round free living and free thinking chap).

Styled as an encyclopedia, Tape Leaders doesn't go in much for evocation of sonix, but the book bulges with fascinating details and the illustrative material is fabulous: groovy looking flyers and posters for electronic music events and multi-media arts festivals, diagrams of equipment set-ups, adverts for brands of tape, and as you might expect lots of black-and-white photos of middle-aged experimenters with well-combed hair, ties and button shirts with the sleeves rolled up posed next to banks of wires, dials, and reel-to-reels. Helliwell has fun with the guidebook format: a rating system evaluates each composer in terms of Commitment Factor, Obscurity Quotient, and Recording Availability. The latter is rather often "Poor". That tantalising effect is one of the only downsides with this delightful book. So often the reader's desire is piqued hopelessly by the knowledge that these works - many written for arty film shorts, theatrical plays or avant-garde ballets - exist in the world but that it's pretty unlikely you'll ever get to hear them. Those pangs are mitigated slightly by the 15-track CD that accompanies Tape Leaders which includes impossibly obscure work by the likes of Peter Grogono, Donald Henshilwood, David Piper, and the aforementioned Berk.

Tape Leaders will be available shortly from Sound On Sound either as a 220-page book + 15 track CD, or as an eBook App with embedded audio.

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Friday, June 17, 2016

Now, tell me, is the section from 2.34 to about 4.20 the first ever example of that gabbling glossalalic stutter-trick of playing the vocal bit on the sampling keyboard in the higher octaves? Early 1983. I wonder who was responsible - Arthur Baker, John Robie, or Jellybean Benitez?(Loathed this song at the time for its squawky shrill chorus - much preferred Freez circa "Southern Freez" with Ingrid Mansfield Allman singing - but the dub mix is pretty tuff I must admit...)Similar sort of stammer-vox in this Jellybean tune from about 4.23 although vocal starts spiraling weird from 4.00... Produced by Robie I think we can conclude that Robie is the pioneer then - viz. his subtle deployment of the E-mu Emulator (the Emulator being the first sampler that worked using a keyboard I believe) on this tune, also from '83.

A song otherwise best known as the source of the vocal bits in "Aftermath" by Nightmares on Wax. Well, but then there was also this from '83 with the avant-silly voice-stabs'Beat Box' reworked in 84second side of Into Battle with the eternal "Moments in Love"

Sunday, June 12, 2016

Tuesday, June 07, 2016

Carl Neville is a name familiar to most in this parish for his blog and for Zero Books nonfiction publications like Classless: Recent Essays on British Film and No More Heroes?: Steroids, Cocaine, Finance and Film in the 70s. I am currently reading his new book Resolution Way, a novel just published on Zero breakaway imprint Repeater. And I'm gripped.Resolution Way uses the speculative fiction technique of zooming into the very near-future - it could be just a few years ahead - in order to magnify the British present. Everything is just slightly more precarious and polarized - the affluent even more entitled and cocooned, the remainder struggling that bit harder and slipping ever nearer the social precipice. Passing references sketch in a backdrop that is recognisable but slightly askew: a extension of now, warped and intensified. Unfamiliar and vaguely disquieting acronyms. Brands, apps, devices and platforms that travel further-along-the-arc from those we currently use to organise and alleviate our boredom, loneliness, vanity, or to assuage our anxious compulsion to keep up. Allusions to political formations and issues that are alarmingly plausible - militant renationalisation groups, a London independence movement.

My favourite so far is the chain Tastee-Pound: "open till four in the morning, instant decisions on micro loans at an annualised 2,300 % interest rate, a pawnbrokers, a betting shop and fast food joint all-in-one." A "one stop poverty and obesity shop" for the lumpen lost of Zones 2 and 3.

The novel's foreground, though, concerns a different feature of the contemporary scene: the drive to unearth long-lost or never-known music / literature / film etc etc and turn it into cultural capital. Writer Alex Hargreaves stumbles across the existence of a beyond-obscure writer/ sound-artist called Vernon Crane and becomes obsessed with recovering and consolidating the dead man's scattered work. As the archive-fever possesses him, Hargreaves is pulled insidiously across the line between curation and appropriation, detective work and crime.
Propelled by lean prose that sparingly flashes into a poetic or epiphanic register, Resolution Way merges elements of science fiction, political satire, thriller and ghost story; it is alternately - sometimes simultaneously - unsettling, acerbic, pacy, and eerie. Highly recommended.